


Lost Boys

by WaterandWin



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel
Genre: AU depending on your definition of AU, Alcoholism, Depression, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, PTSD, despite the summary there is no major character death!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-31
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-11 04:20:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2053368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gravestone read,</p><p><i>Steven Grant Rogers</i><br/><i>1917-1943</i><br/><i>Pneumonia</i><br/> <br/>"Oh Bucky," Steve sighed. "You were supposed to come home, but you weren’t supposed to come home like this.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> At one point in the comics (which [disclaimer] I haven't read) Steve gets shot with a timey-wimey gun that traps him in a single moment, and then plot shit happens and he gets unstuck and bounces around his own timestream for a while and then gets saved? 
> 
> Right. But what if...

It could well have been an eternity, or it could have been a mere second. All Steve knew was that he was standing on solid ground, but not when, or where, or for how long, or even how he got there. The world was a featureless white plane as far as the eye could see and as far as time could stretch.

There was a woman in front of him. Steve would have liked to say she had not been there the second before, but the concept of a second or even that of a ‘before’ and ‘after’ wasn’t piecing itself together in his brain. The fact of that matter was that she was there, if there could even be such a thing as a fact here. She smiled, and she was Steve’s mother.

“Welcome,” she said, or would say, or had said.

“Is this...” he trailed off. “Am I dead?”

“No,” she said. “But you are not alive, either.”

“Then what am I?”

“You are Steven Grant Rogers of Earth 199999,” she said as if it made all the sense in the world, and so it did. “You are unfixed from your time stream. I am sending you somewhere safe.”

“Where?” he asked.

“A vacated universe,” she replied. “One in which you had existed. One you will recognize. But not one in which you exist any longer.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Not all who wander are lost,” the woman said. “And not all who are lost do wander. There is a man who needs your help. You have helped him find you before. Find him, and then find him within him.”

“What?” Steve asked. “How?”

The woman smiled. The floor swallowed him up.

* * *

Steve did not remember falling, but none the less he landed hard on unpacked snow. Above him the the orange of the nighttime city sky peeked through between the branches of a willow tree. There were fireworks in the distance.

He sat up. He recognized the place immediately, because how could he not? He had been a hundred times before. He was not likely to ever forget the look of Green-Wood Cemetery, especially not the tree that guarded his mother’s resting place beside the father he had never met. There was a third grave here now, and he rolled off it as soon as he realized it was this plot that he had so rudely landed upon.

 _Steven Grant Rogers_ , the gravestone read. _1917-1943. Pneumonia._

Steve shivered. A vacated universe, the woman had said—or was saying, or would say—and so it was. No serum here, if sickness could take him. An answer to a question Steve had never dared ask.

He did the only thing he could do. He got up and started walking. The cold was not much of a problem for him, although he was only dressed in a blue business suit. He didn’t remember why. He didn’t remember much of anything recent.

He hopped the fence out of the cemetery and let muscle memory guide him home. Groups of hipsters passed him laughing amongst themselves, clearly intoxicated on the night. Some stared at Steve, others didn’t pay him any mind at all.

“Happy New Year!” one young woman called. The rest of her group echoed the same with bottles of liquor raised high.

“Happy New Year,” Steve answered, then stopped and turned back to them. “Wait, what year is it?”

A chuckle passed through the group. One of the young men let out a low whistle. “Someone’s had some to drink,” another slurred.

“It’s ‘47 now,” the young women offered.

Steve froze breathless between shock and hope. “ _19_ 47?” he asked?

The girl didn’t get a chance to answer, because one of the boys wrapped his arm around her and turned her back to walking the way Steve had come. “Course, what else?” he called over his shoulder, and the group roared with laughter as they turned around the bend.

Steve stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked faster before giving in and breaking into a run. His chest felt tight at the sight of the city the way he remembered it, but he couldn’t stop now to take it all in. There was a vain hope burning the back of his throat that perhaps the course of his life was not the only changed variable.

The phonebook in the payphone on the corner confirmed his suspicions. It was a year (now two) out of date, but in 1945 the old apartment had still been the residence of a J. B. Barnes. Back home, Steve recalled, it had been under the name Rogers, and if it was reasonable to assume that it had originally been the same here, it would mean it must have changed his hands to his next of kin upon the owner's death.

Steve swallowed. So much for still having any living family. Still, J. B. Barnes was good news. It meant Bucky was still at least presumed alive in 1945, which was more than could be said for how things had turned out before. Here at least he came back. Safe. Warm. Nobody’s puppet and nobody’s gun.

Steve sprinted the rest of the way. The doorman was still the same man but for a few extra years etched around his eyes. He did a double take at the sight of Steve.

“I’m here to see Bucky,” Steve told him before the man could form the words to react. “It’s kind of a surprise visit.” He pointed the stairwell. “May I?”

The doorman blinked, sheet white. “Are you...?” he began, then stopped himself, pursed his lips, and looked Steve up and down again.

“I’m, uh...” Steve winced. “A cousin of mine used to live with him? Before the war?”

The man just nodded, very slowly. “Right, sure,” he said at long last. “You got the same uh...” he gestured vaguely to his face,“...family resemblance. Yeah, go on up.”

Steve thanked him in a hurry and did just that, taking the steps two or three at a time. His heart was hammering too hard in his chest. When he got to the right landing, he smoothed his hair, wiped his palms on the front of his pants, and knocked.

There was no answer. He knocked again. Silence.

“Bucky?” he called.

A chair scraped across the floor on the other side, then crashed to the ground. Stumbling. Footsteps. Something slammed into the door and fumbled with the locks. Steve held his breath as the door flew open.

It was Bucky, sure enough. Whole, alive, thinner than Steve remembered, but Bucky none the less, if a little worse for wear. His hair was getting worryingly long and he didn’t look like he’d shaved in a few weeks. He was dressed nice at least, but there was whisky on his breath, and from the way he blinked and squinted and swayed trying to get a look at Steve, there had been quite a lot of it recently.

“Well this is different,” Bucky slurred.

“Hi,” Steve exhaled stupidly, unable to keep a giant grin off his face at the sight of him, no matter how wrecked. “May I come in?”

“Well,” Bucky exhaled with a wave of his hand and stumbled back two steps to let him pass. “You always make it in one way or another.”

A look of concern came upon Steve’s features as he crossed the threshold. “Are you—” he began, and then he looked around. The place was a mess. Dishes in the sink. Pans on the stove. Dust thick enough to see in some places. Steve noticed none of his own stuff had been moved at all. “—feeling okay?” he finished.

“Oh, you know,” Bucky shrugged as he poured himself another glass. “The usual.” He took a sip and pointed an accusatory finger at Steve. “Aren’t you usually smaller?”

Steve crossed the room in three strides and put his hand over the lip of the glass. “That’s enough of that,” he said, and pushed until Bucky was forced to set the drink down on the table. It was only then he noticed the pistol laying casually beside it. His concern deepened. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Bucky just sighed. He sounded so very tired. More tired than he’d ever been coming home from working a double shift at the docks or running a night mission of an hour’s notice. “The usual,” he repeated. “You show up, you talk me out of it...” he picked up the gun. Steve flinched to take it from him but before he could get to it Bucky had already opened the barrel and knocked the single bullet out into the palm of his hand. He dropped it at their feet. “There,” he declared, slamming the empty gun down on the table. “Happy?”

Steve just stared at him. There was nothing else he could think to do. He had seen Bucky at his worst and then some, but it had never like this.

Bucky took the lapse of conversation to finish off the rest of his drink and wipe his mouth. “Good talk,” he said. “I’m going to bed.”

With that he turned heel and walked to the bed in the corner. Without another word he collapsed into it, bothering neither to undress nor remove his shoes. It took a moment of him lying still before Steve finally found it in himself to at the very least stoop and pick up the downed chair.

“Buck,” he started.

Bucky snored. Steve’s heart hurt.

“Oh Bucky,” he sighed, stepping over a broken bottle on the way to the bed. “You were supposed to come home, but you weren’t supposed to come home like this.”

He knelt and took off Bucky’s shoes, then repositioned his feet not to hang off the edge. Bucky didn’t even stir when Steve wiggled his vest off him and hung it at the foot of the bed, nor when he covered him with the rumpled blanket he found kicked to the floor, nor even when he pushed Bucky’s sweaty hair off his forehead and tried his best to smile. Bucky looked more himself when he slept, at least. It was something. There were worse paths for him to tread.

Content for now, Steve got to his feet and looked around. He couldn't leave the place like this. He couldn't leave, period. There was an echo of something he had to do here in the back of his head, but for the life of him he couldn't remember what it was or who had issued the order. Nor did he care, frankly, because Bucky needed his help, the rest of the universe be damned.

It was a good thing there wasn't an ounce of sleep in him. Steve rolled up his sleeves, took a deep breath, and set to work.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope I make you sad.

Bucky slept through most of the morning.

For the first couple hours, Steve came and checked to make sure he was still breathing in between taking out the garbage and dusting the shelves and giving the floor a well-needed mopping. He even scrubbed the bathroom top to bottom, though he mostly avoided touching any of his own old things—which had been left, he was sure, exactly where they had been found upon Bucky’s return. He straightened up the sketchbooks a bit but didn’t open any, as if to preserve the privacy of a stranger, and didn’t dare touch any of the clothes.

In the dead of night, suddenly finding himself home was surreal. This Brooklyn sounded and looked and smelled just the way his heart told him it was supposed to, in a way that the twenty-first century never grew to match. It really was like returning home from a long trip—just five years in the scope of things, but adjusting to a new century made it feel so much longer. He fell back into it more effortlessly than he had thought possible.

Around sunrise he rummaged up the cashbox he and Bucky kept under the bed. The combination was still his mother’s birthday, but the contents were frightfully lacking. He took a few dollars from what remained and jogged down to the corner store. Bucky had butter at home but his bread was stale. No milk either, but plenty of canned beans and vegetables, so Steve got the milk and the bread and a half carton of eggs, too, and brought them all back to the apartment.

By ten he was restless for being cooped up again. He had all the windows cracked open to air out the place and laundry strung up outside. The day’s newspaper was spread out on the newly-cleared table. He’d read it cover to cover. He’d even considered giving some of the want ads a call, because if he was going to stay he may as well be of use. Instead he did the dishes and boiled the eggs and doodled on a full-page advertisement for diapers.

When Bucky finally began to stir an hour later, Steve was by his side with a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin in a heartbeat. Bucky took one look at him, rolled away, and slung an arm over his face.

“There’s no way I’m still this drunk,” he groaned into his elbow.

“How do you feel?” Steve asked hopefully.

During the war, Bucky had been able to hold his liquor better than anyone save Steve himself. It had been impressive at the time but thoroughly unsettling in retrospect, considering that prior to Steve finding him half-delusioned on a HYDRA operating table, he could be heard whining about hangovers just about every weekend.

“Like I’m _dying_ ,” Bucky moaned, and Steve let out a sigh of relief. No serum here, not for either of them. “Oh fuck, maybe I am dead,” Bucky continued under his breath, then shook his head. “No, no, can’t be dead. Ain’t no way you'd be down here with me.” He cracked an eye at Steve, squinting through the late morning light, and then burrowed his face again.

“Just drink this,” Steve told him, offering up the water and ignoring the rest. Bucky didn’t open his eyes, but he propped himself up on his elbow somewhat and accepted the glass. “That’s right,” Steve said, dropping the pills into his hand. “I’ll go close the blinds for you.”

When he returned, the glass was empty, the pills were gone, and Bucky had the whole comforter pulled up over his head. Steve glared down at him with his hands on his hips.

“You can’t stay in bed all day, Buck,” he told him. “Don’t you have to go to work?”

Bucky groaned something that may or may not have been words.

Steve leaned a little closer. “What was that?”

“I said leave me the fuck alone,” he repeated louder.

Steve tried to yank the blanket off of him, but Bucky clung on tight.

“Bucky, get up. Really now,” he pressed. “What time does your shift start?”

Bucky tried in vain several more times to rip the blankets from Steve’s hand, all the while refusing to so much as look at him, until at last he ground his teeth and finally barked, “It doesn’t!”

Steve’s momentarily lapse into stunned silence won him the comforter back with one swift yank and he squeezed himself, cocooned, as close to the wall as he would fit. Meanwhile, Steve could do nothing but stand by the bedside dumbfounded.

“Don’t you dare tell me you don’t have a job,” he said at last in a voice barely over a whisper.

Growing up, finding work and having work and doing work were all anyone seemed to talk about. It was shit conditions and shittier pay, but time and time again the boys had been told how blessed they were to have even that, because the alternative was the Hooverville in Central Park. They may have grown up poor, but they had been some of the lucky ones to have a real roof to return to each night.

“Bucky.” The name fell from his lips, softer now, as he sat down on the empty half of the bed. His hand found the part of blanketed form that must have been Bucky’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. All he could picture were the dead-eyed men and women, like walking corpses, from whom the recession had taken everything but their heartbeats. “I’m here now. It’s alright.”

“No,” Bucky rasped, curling in on himself. “No! Stop lying to me! Leave me alone! I want nothing to do with you!”

Steve withdrew his hand. He withdrew it and he curled it in his lap and he sat perfectly still, looking at the veins in the back of his hand. The last time he had seen Bucky ripped out of himself, it had broken his heart to so much as raise a fist to him; never could he have imagined that being forced to do nothing in its place could hurt even worse. Yet now, inaction was all there was. Sure, stubborn, steady. He sat stock still and waited.

After a minute or two in silence, he finally felt Bucky relax.

More silence, and then Bucky sighed from under his blankets, “you’re still there, aren’t you?”

“I ain’t going anywhere,” Steve promised him.

A finger snaked out from under the covers and pulled them back just enough for Steve to catch a glimpse of a single eye peering out to size him up and down.

“Who _are_ you?” Bucky asked in a voice not entirely his own. “ _What_ are you?”

Steve could probably have lied to him. It would have been a much easier pill to swallow if he were to tell him the same lie he told the doorman, that he was a distant cousin—anything but the incomprehensible truth of a time traveller or a dead friend come back to life. But the fact of the matter was that he couldn’t lie, he just couldn’t, not here, not now, not to Bucky. Especially not like this.

“It’s Steve,” he resigned.

“And I’m the Queen of France,” Bucky spat back, and vanished again under the covers.

“It’s the truth!” Steve called after him. “Bucky, you gotta believe me! It’s really me!”

Bucky said nothing, as if he hadn’t even heard.

“I mean it! Listen, there’s—” he ground his teeth, “—I can’t really explain it and you’re gonna think I’m crazy but there’s this... this whole parallel universe, and this experimental medical procedure, and a box like an upright casket, and _light_ and—Bucky, oh man—Bucky, you wouldn’t even believe it. They made me wear tights!”

He didn’t know what reaction he expected, but he wasn’t surprised when Bucky pressed himself even closer to the wall, as far as he could get from Steve.

“I’ll call the police,” Bucky warned, but where they should have been a threat there was only quiet exhaustion. “Don’t think I won’t.”

“Please,” Steve continued. He was begging now but pride was the least of his concerns. “I don’t have any reason to lie. Please, Bucky, just this. Just believe me.” He didn’t know who else he could go to and frankly he didn’t care. There was nowhere for him _to_ go when the only thing that mattered in the world was broken, and he would trade the entirety of the seventy years he’d just been given back and twice that to set it right again.

All he got in response was the smallest shake of a head.

“Bucky,” he continued, wincing as his voice cracked over the syllables. His hand found Bucky’s shoulder again. “How about you ask me something? Something only he would know. Anything. Just do me that.”

He knew full well the gamble he was making. If their lives were different here even before the war, his case would be done for here and now, but that didn’t make it any less worth trying. Whatever the case may be, his luck held for now; Bucky said nothing at all. Steve decided to keep pushing.

“Do you—” he ventured, swallowed, steadied himself. “Do you remember the last thing you said to me in person?” The shape under the covers tensed. Steve took that as a good sign. “World’s Fair, 1943? June, I think it was. The night before you shipped out, you’d brought those two girls along and we went to see Stark’s—Howard Stark’s I mean—well, his flying car, if you take the term ‘flying’ lightly.” He chuckled dryly despite himself in the knowledge of just how far Stark Industries would drag the idea of flying machines. “Remember that? I was still so dead set at following you off to war I went to try and enlist again. I guess I was getting to be pretty predictable at that point ‘cause you knew just where to find me before I even got a chance to make it to the registration desk, so we butt heads a little—”

“Shut up,” Bucky said.

“Wasn’t all that bad. You had some words for me but I was a lost cause and we both knew it so in the end you just—”

“Shut up!” he repeated louder. “Shut up, shut up, shut _up_!”

Steve only carried on louder over him. “—told me not to do anything stupid while you were gone, to which I—”

An fist flew out from under the blanket. It came down hard enough to be more of a punch than a swat, though either way Steve raised an arm to block it with no effort. Now exposed, Bucky glared at him with wet eyelashes and gritted teeth.

“To which you went and _died_ ,” he spat back, and pushed himself up with no small effort only to wind back and throw another poorly aimed hit that Steve blocked so easily he wasn’t even sure if it was meant to seriously hurt him. “Two years,” he kept yelling. “Two years I waited for a letter and you can be damn sure I was expecting the worst but you think that _prepared_ me for it when I came back here? How _dare_ you?” He threw a third hit, and unsatisfied with it, a fourth and fifth and sixth to punctuate every word. “How. Dare. You. Come. Back. What more do you _want_ from me? What—what more is there for me to give?” His voice cracked into a sob. His final hit was the weakest of all, and when his fist slumped onto the mattress he looked nothing if not utterly drained as he scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his free hand. “I don’t care,” he hiccuped at last, head hung and voice hoarse. “I don’t care. Just take it, whatever it is. I don’t care. Take all of it and just... just go.”

Moving slowly, as if anything more might startle, Steve reached behind him and gently brought the blanket up over Bucky’s shoulders. He pulled it tightly, and although Bucky was looking anywhere but at him, he looked Bucky right in the eye when he said, “I’m not going anywhere, Buck.”

Bucky made a sound that was somewhere between a croak and a sob. “Why do you have to keep doing this to me?” he moaned, but the fight was gone from him and he didn’t put up an ounce of struggle when Steve could no longer contain himself but pull him into his arms. “Why am I being punished like this? Why can’t I just _let go_?”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Steve repeated. “I’m right here. I got you.”

“Is it because I didn’t say goodbye proper?” Bucky continued into the crook of his neck. “Is it because I didn’t wait for you to catch up?”

“No,” Steve told him calmly as he rubbed small circles into his back.

“Is it...” his voice was so small that if Steve hadn’t been holding him close enough he could hear his breath rattle in and out he would never have caught it. “Is it because of all the men I killed?”

“No,” Steve was quick to assure. “Nothing like that.”

“Then... why?”

“Because I—” The word caught in his throat a century too soon. “—care about you,” he finished guiltily. “A lot. You’re important to me, Buck, and I ain’t leaving you again. Not ever.” He paused, then added, “cause it’s you and me ‘till the end of the line, pal. Don’t you go forgetting it.”

Bucky’s shoulders slumped, and all he said was, “sure thing.” He sounded dead, like he didn’t yet allow himself to believe in any of it, but he didn’t move either. His head remained a soft weight on Steve’s shoulder, and Steve would have endured a gun pressed to his head before he dared break apart first. All that left for him was to breathe slowly—in and out, in and out—and hope his heartbeat under Bucky’s ear was enough proof of everything.


End file.
